The easiest marketing videos you’ll ever make

Great photo by Samson Katt.

​Every hear of a “paper edit”? Probably not. 
 
Let’s dive, quickly, into the topic you tuned in for: Making the easiest marketing videos you’ll likely ever make. 
 
It gets better. They’ll also be among the least expensive to produce. 
 
And they’ll also be among the most powerful. 
 
Salivating yet? Let’s get started. 
 
Recycling is good for the planet… and your business
 
A client of ours recently recently pitched a new prospect via a Zoom call. Specifically, they “ran the demo” of the company’s offerings, which included both a PowerPoint slide deck and a demo of specific SaaS (software-as-a-service) offerings. 
 
The call went great. Our client closed the deal. What could be better than that? 
 
How about closing lots of deals? 
 
From the exact same call.
 
You’re smart. You’re already way ahead of us here. Why do we even try to build any suspense? LOL! 
 
The key: Our client recorded the Zoom call. With the prospect’s permission, of course. Important point: the recording did not show the prospect on screen. Only our client, who was presenting. 
 
That recording is worth its weight in gold. It’s a verbatim capture of the best possible sales pitch, with our client hitting it out of the park. 
 
The entire video ran about 20 minutes. 
 
And in it, our client—the one who was running the demo—was making killer point after killer point, with each one nicely illustrated by either a powerful preso slide or quick SaaS demo. 
 
We watched this video, and realized that it was marketing gold, being served to us on a platter. 
 
The paper edit
 
“Paper edit” is an old-school video editing term, which surprisingly isn’t so old-school or even outdated. It’s exactly what we created in this case. And it’s what you can do, too. 
 
(You know you’ve got some good recorded Zoom pitches by now. And if you don’t, you know you’re just itching to record your next one.) 
 
Here’s the task. Take that 20 minutes of raw footage, and convert it into as many little McNugget-sized videos as you can. They should run anywhere from about ten to 30 seconds each. 
 
So you just need to park the video in a window on one side of your screen, and a blank Word doc on the other. Watch the video and look for the organic “start” and “end” points of each little mini-video. Write down the time codes for each. Then come up with a title for that specific mini video. Lather, rinse, repeat, and you’ll have a “paper edit” which you can hand off, along with the big raw-footage file, to your favorite/least-expensive video editor. You will have done the heavy lifting; at this point, your editor simply needs to follow your instructions. 
 
They’ll need to create a master “set of bookends” first: This will be the opening title card, underlying music bed, and tail-end/call-to-action (CTA) title card. Once you approve those, you’re off to the races. Your editor will be able to crank these out like a machine.
 
In our case, the 20 minutes of raw footage yielded more than 20 different short videos. They were so simple to create, that we didn’t even need our usual high-end editor for this assignment. Rather, we handed off the footage and the paper-edit doc to our client’s digital marketing firm; they were able to make these little vids for us—and put them to use, too, since they were able to easily fold them into the account’s digital marketing strategy. 
 
Sure, we continue to make slick, highly-produced videos for this same client. But they’re more expensive and less frequent. These little videos are awesome for keeping the world informed and teased, while easily building up your social presence on platforms like LinkedIn, simultaneously boosting the brand and impressions. 
 
Need help with an assignment like this, or others? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help. 

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